A table, covered by a snowy cloth and set ready for a meal, stood before him. He walked around it, rapped on a door, behind which he heard a murmur of voices, and was immediately favored with a sight of an Acadien kitchen.
This one happened to be large, lofty, and of a grateful irregularity in shape. The ceiling was as white as snow, and a delicate blue and cream paper adorned the walls. The floor was of hard wood and partly covered with brightly colored mats, made by the skilful fingers of Acadien women. There were several windows and doors, and two pantries, but no fireplace. An enormous Boston cooking range took its place. Every cover on it glistened with blacking, every bit of nickel plating was polished to the last degree, and, as if to show that this model stove could not possibly be malevolent enough to throw out impurities in the way of soot and ashes, there stood beside it a tall clothes-horse full of white ironed clothes hung up to air.
But the most remarkable thing in this exquisitely clean kitchen was the mistress of the inn,—tall, willowy Mrs. Rose à Charlitte, who stood confronting the newcomer with a dish-cover in one hand and a clean napkin in the other, her pretty oval face flushed from some sacrifice she had been offering up on her huge Moloch of a stove.
"Can you give me some lunch?" asked Vesper, and he wondered whether he should find a descendant of the Fiery Frenchman in this placid beauty, whose limpid blue eyes, girlish, innocent gaze, and thick braid of hair, with the little confusion of curls on the forehead, reminded him rather of a Gretchen or a Marguerite of the stage.
"But yes," said Mrs. Rose à Charlitte, in uncertain yet pretty English, and her gentle and demure glance scrutinized him with some shrewdness and accurate guessing as to his attainments and station in life.
"Can you give it to me soon?" he asked.
"I can give it soon," she replied, and as she spoke she made an almost imperceptible motion of her head in the direction of the neat maid-servant behind her, who at once flew out to the garden for fresh vegetables, while, with her foot, which was almost as slender as her hand, Mrs. Rose à Charlitte pulled out a damper in the stove that at once caused a still more urgent draft to animate the glowing wood inside.
"Can you let me have a room?" pursued Vesper.
"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Rose, and she turned to the third occupant of the kitchen, a pale child with a flowerlike face and large, serious eyes, who sat with folded hands in a little chair. "Narcisse," she said, in French, "wilt thou go and show the judge's room?"